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Are You Using These New AdWords Features?

If your business is already using Google AdWords for its pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you’re probably already quite familiar with how it works. But as with everything online, Google is always making updates to its features, improving your advertising experience and giving you new ways to reach potential customers.

Here’s a quick round-up of some of the new AdWords features and recent changes, and some ideas on how you can use them to your advantage online.

Search Terms Report

The search terms report feature is fantastic for future ads and working out what exactly is driving the most traffic to your site. The report shows the terms that were searched that then triggered your ad, and how these terms they performed for you.

This report is great for working out if you should add certain keywords to ad groups, both ones you may already have and may not. It shows you the terms that were both highly searched for and generated conversions for you.

It’s also incredibly useful for finding out if specific terms are driving a lot of traffic but few conversions. This allows you to add these to your negative keywords list so you’re not wasting money on impressions that aren’t actually earning you any money.

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

Remarketing on its own is a fantastic tool for generating leads, and has shown time and time again to have much higher conversion rates and a lower cost-per-conversion. Now AdWords has added a great new feature that enables you to add existing remarketing lists into search-only campaigns.

With remarketing lists for search ads (or RLSA), you can bid for specific remarketing keywords, usually very broad terms, that users who already came to your site were actually searching for. You’ll only be showing these ads to previous visitors, which means you can bid on keywords you know visitors already associate with your site, products, or services.

As a result, you can create a campaign with strong, previously converting keywords and bid them into a higher position. That’s a win-win if you ask me!

Here’s a detailed webinar, provided by Google, that gives you an overview of RLSA.

Campaign Testing Capabilities

Instead of coming up with multiple campaigns and having to do hours of tweaking for tests, AdWords now has a draft mode, allowing you to use real-time data to stage and test ideas without having to fully commit to them.

This is a great for making data-driven decisions about how you want your ads to look and be shown. In draft mode, you can do bid changes, add new keywords, change campaign settings, set special bids for times and locations, and change ad formats. This is definitely something worth spending some time using.

Mobile Targeting

The rise of smartphones and tablets over the last few years has been nothing short of meteoric, and Google is now moving AdWords firmly in this direction. The ability to create ads for certain devices has already been around for some time but more app-specific features are being added to target users based on not only what type of device they have, but how they use it.

click here to download Google’s mobile best practices checklist

Your business can now target potential customers through ads that appear based on what apps the user already has, how frequently they use them, and even in-app purchases that they have made. As of now, AdWords is primarily rolling out these features for Android devices and the Google App Store, but this will no doubt be a feature usable with Apple devices very soon.